


costumed

by WattStalf



Series: A Not-So-Blue Planet [4]
Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Kink Meme, but not kinky, part of a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 12:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6195673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WattStalf/pseuds/WattStalf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Dan fully became Nite Owl and then became Dan again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	costumed

**Author's Note:**

> This is another part of my series for the kink meme prompt where there is no Dr. Manhattan. As established in Laurie's story, the Crimebusters happens with Hollis helping, Eddie is never a part of it, and she has a relationship with Adrian. This is Dan's side of the story.

“You know, if you never say anything to her, you don't know what her answer's gonna be,” said Hollis.

“I don't...really know what you're talking about,” replied Dan. A rather obvious lie, considering Hollis had just caught him watching the young Silk Spectre talking with Ozymandias across the room.

“Sure you don't,” he said with a snort. “I've been around longer, remember? I can tell these sort of things. And it's pretty obvious that you wanna talk to her, but you've just been watching her for weeks now. What's the worst that could happen?”

“Do you want a list of things that could go wrong or just the absolute worst?” He shook his head. “It's nothing, anyway.”

“Look, I'm gonna give you so practical advice,” Hollis said. “You don't know until you try, and it's never as bad as you think it's gonna be. But waiting around until it's too late? Now _that_ is exactly as bad as you'd think. Trust me, I'd know.”

“Not with a girl like her, you don't,” he said, shaking his head again. “I mean, Silk Spectre, she's...” He trailed off, not quite sure how to articulate it.

“I know better than you'd think,” he replied with a chuckle. “Just think about what I said. Talking to her isn't as hard as you'd think.”

Dan wanted to ask Hollis, “If you want me to talk to her so much, how come you and Nelson never pair us up for patrols?” but he didn't. If he did, he was afraid of an answer concerning why she was paired up with Ozymandias so frequently, and he was afraid that he would actually get paired with her and would not know what to say. No matter what Hollis said, he knew that she was out of his league and he knew that he could mess up a lot by trying to talk to her.

~X~

If he wasn't paired up with Rorschach, who had been his partner before they had joined the Crimebusters, he was sometimes paired up with Nelson, or he was sent out on his own, because he was skilled enough and had his fair share of gadgets that could almost make up for not having a partner. Dan didn't mind going on his own, and the group was an odd number considering Hollis was technically retired, so someone would always have to take turns being the odd one out.

Hollis had trained him well before he retired, anyway. Dan hadn't set out to retire him, had only set out to get some advice and get to meet his hero, but Hollis confessed to him that he felt like he was getting too old for this and that a young successor might be a good idea. So he trained Dan and introduced Dan to the world of crime fighting and extended an invitation to him when he and Nelson agreed to form the Crimebusters. If anyone could handle themselves on the streets, it was him.

But the Twilight Lady was a bit more than most could handle. She was skilled and she was intelligent and she knew how to handle herself in more ways than one. There was no need for her to be a villain to run her operations, but she recognized the appeal of it, just as the original Silk Spectre had realized the appeal of being a hero all those years ago. She gave herself an air of dark mystery and of power, and she scared away competition and brought in all sorts of clients. As time went on, she began to embrace the villain side of her persona and would sometimes pull off elaborate schemes, just for the fun of it.

She had been the topic of discussion at many meetings, but no one had really made any headway in putting her away for good. The Twilight Lady was clever and she always managed to get away and to evade capture. She also always seemed to show herself whenever Dan was the one looking, and he wasn't sure if she flirted this much with the other men on his team, but no one had ever mentioned it and he wasn't sure how to bring something like that up.

He was pretty sure that she had never approached one of them on the streets, cornering them in an alley with no purpose other than to talk to them and toy with them, but that was another thing he wouldn't bring up, because then he would have to admit why he failed to capture her when she did that, and then he would have to admit that he had had no good reason; he simply hadn't tried. Whenever she cornered him like that, he found himself transfixed, and he would not have been able to fight her even if he had wanted to.

Tonight was one of those nights that she cornered him, and he once again cursed himself for not being able to do anything to her. He knew that it did not matter that she was a woman; there was nothing about her that was not fearsome and she needed to be stopped, but he couldn't help but think that the fact that she was a woman had a lot to do with his problem. Or maybe just the fact that he had never met a woman like her before; the new Silk Spectre tried to emulate her mother's reputation for embracing her sex appeal, but this went entirely beyond that.

The Twilight Lady did not just embrace her sex appeal, her entire identity was based around it; she reveled in it. The outfits she wore, the way she carried herself, the way she spoke, everything about her seemed to be for the express purpose of exhibiting that she knew that power that came from her looks. It was a power that always managed to bewitch Dan in a way that he had never been bewitched before.

“Look whose out and about again,” she purred, placing a finger on his chest. He flinched, but did not move. “You really are a night owl, aren't you?” She laughed at her remark, trailing the finger over his chest, and he had to fight off a shiver. “Fitting name. Tell me, what's it gonna take to get a cutie like you to give me some business?”

“I...” He could feel himself blushing, not the first time she made him grateful for darkness covering that. “I would never allow myself to sink to those depths, ma'am,” he finally managed.

The Twilight Lady let out a loud, theatrical laugh at that before clutching her chest even more theatrically. “Oh, you break this lady's heart. Do you really think it's that bad, doing what I do? Is being with a woman like me really considered sinking? I have a soft spot for cute boys like you, but don't kid yourself- I know I'm out of your league just as much as you have to know it.”

His blush darkened, but this time because she was right, he did know it. “That's not...” Typically, getting into costume gave him confidence that he did not have in his ordinary life, but when she had him like this, he could not form proper sentences or find the words to say what he wanted to say.

“One of these days, you'll come around.”

~X~

Long after he was home alone, the remark still made him shiver in anticipation of something he knew he shouldn't seek out. The temptation was great, but he knew better than that and besides, she wasn't the sort of woman he wanted. Laurie- and when he was alone, he allowed himself to think of her using her real name- was, and she was so different.

Everything from her appearance to her personality was completely different, and she was the one he wanted. Maybe she was out of his league too, but if he was going to shoot out of his league, it would at least be for someone like Laurie, and he began to wonder if he was doing the right thing, avoiding the situation like this. There might be something to what Hollis said, and if he kept waiting around, things wouldn't get any better for him.

He decided he was going to talk to her, and things wouldn't be so bad and he would be more confident about things and then somehow, she would find him charming, and there wouldn't be need to think about any other women. Getting up his nerve was difficult, but he felt ready to approach Laurie at the next Crimebusters meeting.

But when he arrived, he could tell by the way she was hanging off of Ozymandias that their relationship had moved beyond patrol partners and Hollis gave him a sympathetic clap on the shoulder as he passed him. Just as he had predicted, Dan had missed his chance, but he had only decided to give himself the chance recently. Before, he had been expecting to be disappointed, but it was just as he had decided he had nothing to lose that he had lost.

He didn't know why he had expected any differently. Silk Spectre was out of his league and never even noticed him. The more he thought about it, there had only been one woman who had noticed him much recently, and the next time the Twilight Lady approached him, he went with her.

“Do your worst,” he said.

~X~

She didn't do her worst, not at first, anyway. She told him that he wouldn't be able to handle that right off the bat and accurately guessed that he had never been with another woman before. In fact, compared to some of the horror stories he had heard about her tastes, things were incredibly tame in the beginning, but he was ashamed to find himself wanting to go that far, as time went by.

She started by tying him up, but he graduated from that quickly enough, and soon they were doing things he had never even heard of and never expected himself to like, much less love. And through all of it, their masks never came off and it was never known to anyone but them that they were meeting up like that. She continued to evade the law and he pretended that he barely knew a thing about her.

His free time, his time not normally spent as Nite Owl, suddenly became his time with her and he didn't care about being in the costume so often. It made him feel more like himself and she always thought it was cute, anyway. He wasn't quite naive enough to think that they were falling in love, but if that were to happen in the future...well, no one knew her true identity. It wasn't impossible to think he could get her out of this life, if he tried, and make an honest woman out of her. He was at least naive enough to think that he could make it work.

But even as caught up in their fling as he was, he couldn't ignore her crimes. Being with him hadn't made her any less of a criminal, and the rest of his team still considered her a serious threat. If anyone noticed the way he got distant when she was brought up at meetings, they did not say anything, but he knew that something would have to change soon.

“Do you ever think about getting out of here?” he asked her one day, deciding that he had to be bold. He couldn't afford not to be.

“And why would I do a thing like that?” she replied.

“Because we can't carry on on opposite sides forever,” he said. “If we're going to continue like this...”

She laughed at him then, and the sound was harsh. “If you think I have any intention of switching sides, you need to drop that fantasy fast. I like spending time with you. You're cute and you're eager and it's been fun building your confidence, but if you think I'm going to change just because I like you...don't.”

He would have liked to be able to say that he pleaded with her further after that, that he forced her to see reason, or that he up and left her then, that he gave her an ultimatum, but he did neither. Instead, Dan only fell silent, and things went mostly back to normal between the two of them. He was getting damn good at hiding disappointment, and she didn't bring it up again, not even to mock him over it.

~X~

He couldn't ignore what she did anymore and he knew it. Once upon a time, he could pretend that it was okay, that he would get her to stop one day and that she was not doing any harm, but that wasn't the case. She was doing harm and she wouldn't stop and he was doing something wrong with her. No matter what she could do for him or how she made him feel like he was better than he had been before, she was a criminal and he was a hero. That wasn't something he could ignore anymore.

Over time, he had gotten better at reading her and figuring out when she had something big planned, when she was about to pull of some sort of heist, and was even good at predicting where she would strike and how she would strike. He came up with a believable story of how he had managed to investigate her and confided Hollis and Captain Metropolis of his suspicions.

Though he insisted that someone else take the case, they replied that he deserved to be the one to get credit for bringing her in, since his investigation had contributed so much, and though he was afraid of what might come out if he did it, he did it. And when he had her cornered, she gave him a sad smile but she didn't say a word about him. Throughout her entire trial, she didn't say anything to let on that they knew each other intimately and nothing about their affair ever came to light.

Her name was revealed to be Leslie, and he realized that he had been ready to put a lot on the line for a woman he didn't actually know. She was put away, and his secret was safe, and Silk Spectre and Ozymandias were still considered a vigilante power couple, while Dan was sent on more and more solo patrols because he was now believed to be more productive when he worked on his own.

That would have bothered him more, but even when he was paired up to patrol with Rorschach, the man had grown distant even by his standards. The two had been partners before all of this, and there had been a time when he had been just a little bit more open with Dan than others, but now Dan felt as though he was just the same to Rorschach as anyone else.

But, whether it was because he had nothing to distract him or because he felt the need to prove himself, he did become more productive and he brought in several big name criminals single-handedly. In his every day life, he became more and more reclusive, focusing all of his time on developing new gadgets, making improvements on his suit, doing whatever he could to be the best Nite Owl he could be because when he wasn't Nite Owl, he didn't feel like himself.

In a way, he was grateful when everything started to collapse and when the hero bubble really burst. He didn't know how to be Dan Dreiberg anymore, he didn't have a shred of confidence outside of his mask, but he didn't want to be that way. When the Keene Act was passed, he was more than willing to quit, even if Rorschach continued. Ozymandias had retired two years before, but he was never out of the picture, and everyone knew that the pretty girl on Adrian Veidt's arm was the Silk Spectre. The two of them were married not long after she retired.

Dan retired to a solitary life, but he had grown used to that over the years and he needed the time by himself to start to rebuild his real identity. There were times that he would sit in his basement, staring at the old costume, wondering how much harm it would do if he suited up just one last time, but he never did. When Adrian was elected president and Dan received his first phone call from the First Lady, he wondered what she would say if he confessed he had had feelings for her for years, but he never did. He hoped that he and Laurie could become friends this time.

Becoming Dan again was not easy and he did not know if he would ever fully go back to the man he was before or if he could fully shed the Nite Owl to become someone new, but as long as he was trying, he figured that had to count for something.

**Author's Note:**

> Next time, I hope to do Adrian's story.


End file.
